Why Should Delaware Care
The Clifford Brown Jazz Festival is an annual free jazz concert held in Wilmington that serves as a shared space for community members and visitors to gain exposure to a variety of sounds. This year, the event started on a rainy note but that did not stop Rodney Square from being a place that fosters connections for long-time friends, vendors building clientele and performers giving back to their home.
Matt La Von grew up a Marine brat, moving from place to place and leaving short-lived friendships behind — until he got to Delaware in the 1990s.
While living in Bear, La Von attended his first jazz concert: Wilmington’s Clifford Brown Jazz Festival. He fell in love with the genre, and his high school band director pushed La Von to pursue that passion.
He has since moved away from northern Delaware, but La Von, now a professional saxophonist, came back to the Clifford Brown Jazz Festival this week.
He returned not as an attendee, but to perform alongside his quintet in front of his longtime high school friends whom he refers to as his family.
“Man, I’ve been so busy and wrapped up in my own busy life in New York City that I forgot about this special place that I can attribute almost everything to,” La Von said. “If I didn’t have these experiences, if I wasn’t shaped by these people, I wouldn’t be doing what I am doing today.”
La Von was one of 20 performers who took the stage at Wilmington’s Rodney Square during this year’s jazz festival, a week-long celebration of the legacy left behind by jazz trumpeter Clifford Brown.
Wilmington shows up for the arts
Even when the festival started on a rainy note Monday evening, it still drew in a crowd of around 1,500 people, said Lattisha Williams, program assistant of cultural affairs for the city of Wilmington. The community came wearing their ponchos or raincoats, and a slew of umbrellas lined the festival grounds.
The late Clifford Brown, the festival’s namesake, was a jazz trumpeter from Wilmington’s East Side who contributed to the creation of the hard bop sound that reigned over jazz in the 1950s.
He has been described as one of the greatest trumpet players in history, La Von said, particularly for his warm sounds that are repeated by players today.
“Whether I’m in New York or Paris, I’m pretty sure that there is an 80 to 90% probability that [Clifford Brown’s “Joy Spring”] is getting played in any club session,” La Von said.
Brown’s legacy also expands beyond the festival’s end date. CityFest Wilmington also hosts free live concerts every Wednesday during the summer season.
Arreon Harley-Emerson, CEO and artistic director of Elevation Ensemble by Elevate Vocal Arts, recalled a time when the festival was the only event happening at Rodney Square. Now, he said, the space blossoms with art- and music-centered events.
“I think that Clifford Brown is an example of what can happen when we believe in the arts,” Harley-Emerson said.
And data suggests that Delaware believes in the arts. The state ranks third in the country for arts funding per capita, according to the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, spending an estimated $7.03 per person on the arts this year.
Both Delaware and the city of Wilmington also ranked among the National Center for Arts Research’s most arts-vibrant communities in the country last year.
Festival attendees share jazz across generations
As Wilmington resident Karin Smallwood looked around the festival crowd on Monday, ranging from toddlers to seniors, she said the best part was seeing how the free concert bolstered the culture of jazz.
“It’s a great opportunity for the younger generation to experience jazz music,” Smallwood said. “Even if they don’t know what it is, you will still see them tapping their foot and nodding their heads.”
Brittany Draxton, who recorded her 7-year-old son Ryland as he patted his small hands on a circle of drums free for community members to play with, said it was important that she show him the festival’s beauty.
“The fact that he was able to express his skills, and there’s this peace here, and the music,” she said. “It’s about keeping the Southern jazz culture alive.”
Jonathan Mitchell, owner of Mitch’s Mo’Better Chicken food truck, has been serving his food to festival attendees since 2012. His participation, though, extends far earlier than that.
“Since I was 10 years old I have been coming here,” Mitchell said. “And now I’m coming as a vendor, so it’s a good experience where the whole community comes out, and I get to see my repeat customers.”
Mitchell’s cousin, Jeron Johnson, was a first time vendor at the festival this year, serving water ice from his food truck Treat 2 You.
“We used to come here just to see my cousins and the show,” he said, pointing to Mitchell. “So it’s a blessing to be inside here doing my work.”
Music that transcends cultures
The festival brought in musicians across multiple genres, from gospel, to R&B, to sounds traditional of Native American tribes.
R. Carlos Nakai is a Native American flautist who takes inspiration from the indigenous communities he is a part of, the Navajo Nation and the Ute Tribe. He said he hopes to bring a different expression to America’s multicultural music scene during his performance this Saturday.
What’s most important to him is the possibility of connecting with jazz artists to freestyle. He said he hopes the audience will welcome new sounds they may have never heard before.
“Maybe we will offer a kind of opportunity or information that they can build upon in their own way to express themselves in the mixed community that this country is,” Nakai said.
La Von, the professional saxophonist, said the festival has always featured diversity. What he most remembers from the festival during his first visit is the wide variety of demographics sitting on the stairs or in their lawn chairs to listen to jazz.
He hoped to achieve a similar feeling on Monday with his song, “Solidarity,” he said, created in response to the protests after the 2019 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
“I wanted to write something that incorporated those feelings, and, you know, get back to the feeling of togetherness,” La Von said, “which is what we’re missing in so many parts of society.”
Get Involved
The Clifford Brown Jazz Festival will run through Aug. 8 at Rodney Square in downtown Wilmington. The festival is free to attend, and begins at 5:15 p.m. on Friday, and 2 p.m. on Saturday. More information can be found here.
